Sunday, June 28, 2009

Adventures in Clerking: Part I

She was the newest addition to the law clerks at the firm, a recent graduate, in her first real job, excited to be there and to learn and grow as a professional. Already, things were not quite as she had imagined. There were seven lawyers at the firm: three partners, four associates, one big-haired legal secretary, one remarkably crotchety bookkeeper (who seemed to come and go as she well pleased), one incredibly nice and incredibly abused driver, and then the clerks, four of them—Valentina, Kunyu, Laura, and finally her, Becky. All of the clerks were recent grads. All of them had higher aspirations than clerking.

At the end of the first week she realized that there was not going to be any formal, or informal, for that matter, job training. She was doing the best she could.


When Becky arrived, just a few minutes past nine, not a single attorney’s car was in the lot. She recognized Valentina’s beater Toyota, with peeling red paint, and Kunyu’s bike was locked inside the courtyard.

She entered through the kitchen.

“Hey!” Kunyu had a phone tucked between her head and shoulder. She was also in the middle of doing a huge stack of dishes. Attorneys, Becky had quickly learned, were violently allergic to doing their own dishes.

“He—hey,” Becky stammered, not wanting to interrupt Kunyu’s conversation.

“It’s okay,” Kunyu gestured at the phone. “It’s just the fucking court. They put me fucking on hold again. Hello? Yes, I’m calling on behalf of attorney Nicole Ryan? Is this department 47? Good. Yes, she wanted to let you know she’s going to be fifteen minutes late. Yes. Yes, that’s all she told me. That’s all she told me! Okay, bye.” She hung up. “Fucking court clerks.”

The door slammed, and Laura, the clerk-receptionist, traipsed through on her way to the front.

“Oh hey, hey, hey!” she grinned, “ready for another fun-filled day at NAB?”

Kunyu rolled her eyes.


Becky’s office was at the far back upstairs corner of the second building. She spent most of the morning trying to decipher and execute a task that Tom, the head attorney, had given Valentina, which Valentina in turn had given her. None of it had been very clearly explained, and even if it had been, it was still stultifying boring. She slogged through a huge box of documents, trying to figure out what information was relevant, and compiled notes into a memo she eventually intended to give to Tom. She kept at it for a couple hours, but then finally reached a dead end where she really didn’t understand what to do. Grabbing a pen and paper, she headed downstairs and across the courtyard to throw herself on Valentina’s mercy. Valentina had been at the firm for the longest, and as such had been promoted to the position of Tom’s exclusive law clerk (why anyone would want, let alone accept, this promotion, Becky mused, was a mystery). If anyone would be able to decipher these directions, it would be her.

Becky went back in through the kitchen door again. She was greeted by the sight of Kunyu violently kicking the photocopier.

“Fucking—oh hey! Yeah, it’s not working again. Sometimes if you just kick it…”
“Right…” said Becky, “yeah, sure. Uh, I’m just going to go ask Valentina a question.”

Kunyu didn’t hear her. She was busy slamming doors on the machine, and listening to its machinations. Becky inched around her, and crossed the lobby into Valentina’s front office.

Valentina was typing like a madwoman. Her back was to the door.

“Uh… Valentina?” Becky queried.
“Yes?” Valentina whipped around. She had dark unkempt hair, and an aquiline nose, on which were perched a dainty pair of reading glasses. She peered over them, still typing while looking in the other direction.

“Oh!” she stopped typing, finally. “How are you? It’s crazy around here today!” she chortled. “Except, no really. It’s crazy.” She grabbed a document and walked over to the fax machine.

“Uh… fine? Actually, I was hoping I could ask you a question.”
“Sure, sure,” she smiled, “oh shit, though, is this about that Hunsaker stuff? Cause I have no fucking idea. I don’t even think Tom knows what he wants.”

Becky’s heart sank in her chest.

Valentina took a look at it, and gave some suggestions. They weren’t hard and fast answers, but Becky supposed they were better than nothing. She headed back over to the other building, stopping through the kitchen again to get a cup of tea. Liz, the big-haired legal secretary, was helping herself to a bagel. It always seemed like Liz was in the kitchen.

“Better have a bagel…” she muttered, in a strong Long Island accent, “before ya start to get shaky!”

Becky had a very hard time understanding when Liz was talking to her or talking to herself, now and in general. Becky opted for just smiling and nodding. Not to be vicious, but looking at Liz, it was hard to believe that the woman would hurt from any lack of food. Becky tried to estimate how tall Liz was without the hair and six inch heels that she always wore—5’1”? 5’2”? Becky grabbed her tea and retreated from the kitchen before she could become entrenched in conversation with Liz. It was known to happen.


Becky kept at it with the Hunsaker documents, counting down the minutes until lunch. Finally it was 12. She went over to Kunyu’s office, which was right next-door, intending to nonchalantly ask her if she’d like to have lunch in the courtyard together. Becky was still semi-awkwardly trying to make friends.

Kunyu was slumped down in her swivel desk chair, one hand holding a phone to her ear, the other holding her forehead. A strange device was sitting at her desk, and momentarily forgetting to feel awkward, Becky picked it up and started looking at it. It appeared to be a set of goggles, but with two large plastic appliances attached to each side of them.

“Yeah, alright,” said Kunyu. “I’ll try that again.” She hung up the phone.
“What are these?” Becky asked, curiosity getting the better of her.
“Tom’s audio swim goggles,” sighed Kunyu. “Apparently they’re state of the art. Too bad they don’t fucking work!”
“They play music? To listen to under water?”
“Audiobooks, actually. Tom prefers LeCarre mystery novels.”
“Novels?” Becky was amazed. “I didn’t know Tom was much of a swimmer.” Or a reader, come to it. Tom was a very, very, large man, who suffered from diabetes. Swimming was difficult to imagine.

“He’s not. He hates exercising. That’s why he needs the novels.” Kunyu shrugged.
“And you’re fixing these?”
“Yep.”
“That sucks.”
“Tell me about it. We’re in the middle of a double-homicide case, our client is facing a lifetime in prison, and I’m spending my time fixing swim goggles. It’s fucking ridiculous.”

Becky laughed. What else could you do?

“You want to have lunch?”
“Yeah, okay. I think Tom is at Le Maison for lunch, anyways. He won’t be back for at least an hour.”

Adventures in Clerking: Part II

After a pleasant lunch in the courtyard, Becky stopped by the main building to check her inbox. Tom and a couple other attorneys strolled in through the front, back from their lunch as well. Becky kept her head down and tried to stay out of the way.

“Hey, hey… you,” Tom, Becky realized, was addressing her. “Sit down with us for a second.”

She sat down with him in the center of the lobby, along with Daniel, one of the junior associates, who seemed to be attempting to smile reassuringly. She didn’t quite feel reassured.

“We need you to do a very important project for us,” Tom intoned. He looked very serious. She looked from Tom to Daniel, suddenly feeling nervous.

“Absolutely. Tell me what you need.” Legal pad posed on lap, she readied herself to take thorough notes.
“So you know that case, that, that—”
“Hunsaker,” clarified Daniel.
“That Hunsaker case,” Tom continued fluidly, “what we need is one of those, those—”
“Grids?” supplied Daniel.
“Right, a grid, like a, a—”
“Table.”
“A table, exactly, of the, the—you know, that thing you’ve been working on—”
“The chronology,” Daniel translated, “the Hunsaker chronology that you’ve been researching for us. We’d like you to organize it into a table.”
“Great,” her voice quavered slightly; she prayed they didn’t notice.
“So for columns, no for rows, we want dates, for columns, we want document, bates stamp number, description, source, who was involved, and oh, oh—well let’s start with that.” Tom nodded, satisfied, at Daniel. He scratched his ear. That seemed to be the end of all the instructions she was going to get. She looked down at her pad of paper. She had written down:

grid
table
columns rows, dates
columns doc, bates? stamp #s, ? ? ?

She looked up at both of them. Her mouth felt incredibly dry.

Daniel looked like he had something else to add. In the end, he settled with, “If you have questions, just come talk to me.”
“Okay,” she was reeling, “Would you prefer this done in Word, or Excel?”
“What?” Tom seemed outraged, his voice nearing hysterical. She shrank two inches in her chair. “What is she asking? ‘Excel’? I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a computer program--” started Daniel.
“Excel? I don’t know, I don’t care; we just need a grid, okay? Alright? Just a grid. Simple. Can you do that?”
“Excel will be fine,” Daniel interjected.
“However you want to do it, I don’t care,” Tom was throwing his hands up in the air now. “Just a grid. You can do that, right? That’s not too much to ask for?”
“Of course not,” she felt about the size of a six year old. Just behind Tom’s head, she noticed Laura, the receptionist, was smirking.
“That’s no problem,” with effort, Becky made eye contact with Tom. “If anything comes up, I’ll talk to Daniel.” Thank God for that.
“Okay,” said Tom, somewhat calming. “Great. That will be very, very useful for us. Now Daniel…”

And they headed slowly and loudly upstairs to Tom’s office, debating a finer point on a sexual assault and battery case.


Becky took a deep breath. Laura caught her eye, and laughed.

“That’s a very important project, there,” she grinned. “You better get right to work on that one.”
She looked at her paper. “All he wants is a simple Excel table, right? With like five different columns?”
Laura shrugged, “Sounds like it. But that’s a very important project,” she imitated Tom’s tone, “that is critically important to us. Are you sure you can handle that?”
Finally Becky smiled, but there was still a curl of tension in her stomach. “Ah, man,” she said, “I’m really glad I have that Stanford degree, to prepare me for such difficult projects, such as making a single table in Excel.”
“Excel?” mocked Laura, “what’s Excel?”
Becky smiled. “Laura,” she began, “what’s a ‘bates stamp’—?”
“No, really though,” said Laura, as the phone rang and she reached for it. “You should get going. He’ll buzz you before you know it. It’s one of those days. I can tell.”


Tom buzzed Becky in her office approximately every thirty minutes on the hour and half hour for the rest of the afternoon. She lost track of how many times she printed out the template for the Hunsaker table, ran over to show it to him, and came back with his corrections. Eight times? Ten times? It felt like the most horrendous waste of paper she had ever experienced. At one point, Tom objected to the height of a particular row, and she internally debated whether or not it was worth it to try to explain the Autofit feature of cell sizing. She decided against it, and just adjusted the row manually, even though it was unnecessary.

Nearing the end of the afternoon she felt shredded, a pile of nerves. And for what? she thought. For some rehashing of the information that they already have, that they may or may not actually use in trial. She stepped into Valentina’s office, to drop off the finalized template into Tom and Daniel’s boxes. Not that it was actually filled in yet. Tom just wanted confirmation (ie, more trees to die).

Adventures in Clerking: Part III

Valentina practically leapt on her. “Becky!” she looked frantic. “Can you do the Whole Foods run?”
“Um… yes? Wait—what?”
“We have office meeting tonight? You know about office meeting?”
“We have a meeting tonight?” Becky died a little inside. She was so ready to go home.
“Office meeting! No one told you about this? Figures. It’s not really a meeting. We just eat a bunch of food and the partners drink scotch and that’s about it. It’s one of our ‘job benefits.’ Ha.”
“Oh.” That sounded bearable.
“So can you go? To get the food?”
“Sure. Yeah, no problem.”

Valentina frenetically wrote out a list, with very specific instructions about what sort of sushi was Tom’s favorite (spicy tuna), and exactly which loaves of bread she should look for, and which items to get from the cold case. Becky started to perk up a little bit. It was a nice break to get out of the office, for sure, and she purely enjoyed food shopping. Laura gave her a company credit card—telling her not to spend over $150 exactly, or Judy, the bookkeeper, would kill someone—and she was on her way. Company credit card in one hand, scribbled list from Valentina in the other, she stepped into Whole Foods, breathing a sigh of relief while surveying an impressive pyramid of grapefruit. Then she checked the time.

It was 4:45. Meeting, as Valentina had strictly admonished her, would start in exactly 15 minutes.

She grabbed a cart and started running.

“Spicy tuna… Sonoma chicken salad… Sour Batard? No, it was the Sweet Batard…” The other patrons were giving her looks. She didn’t care. Seriously—who are these people? With nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon than do their leisurely overpriced shopping—they’d never understand.

She rounded a corner to the cheese section. “Two soft cheeses—” she instinctively grabbed a brie, then dithered before pulling a Dutch wedge with an orange rind, “—and one hard.” Manchego? Gouda? Wasn’t that a semi-hard, technically? She started to panic, and just grabbed a Huntsman cheddar in front of her. ‘You can’t go wrong with cheddar, right?’ she thought to herself. ‘And besides—it’s just cheese.’

She rounded the corner to the checkout, and sweating it out in line, attempted to tally the cost of everything in her head, while simultaneously trying to double check that she had pulled everything on her list, which proved both counterproductive and headache-inspiring. Mercifully, it all came out just under $150. She grabbed the bags and ran to the parking lot.

When she pulled into the NAB lot, Kunyu met her at the car and helped her quickly unload the bags and take them into the patio. Laura had already pulled plates and glasses, which she was setting out. Liz was already there, of course, asking where the food was, but Tom was not.

‘Thank GOD.’

Valentina came out as well, and helped unpack the items. “This looks great,” she said, smiling at Becky, “you did a great job.”

Becky attempted a smile.

One of the junior attorneys, Nicole, was holding a wine bottle and looking around helplessly.

“Did we—” she asked Kunyu, “—bring out the wine opener?”

Kunyu gave a dark look. She went into the kitchen.

Liz was reaching for a drinking glass. “Do we,” she turned towards Laura, “not have any water??”
“No,” said Laura, though only Becky seemed to hear her. “The whole office is out of water. There’s no more water in the world.” She went into the kitchen.

And so it went, the clerks running in and out of the kitchen to grab items as needed, people opening bottles and passing food. Becky started to perk up after a glass of wine, and really, the food was delicious. Tom finally seemed to be in a better mood, which in turn led the entire office to breath a sigh of relief.

“Pass the salmon,” Dan, the youngest of the three partners, said while intently texting on his Blackberry. ‘Please?’ Becky thought to herself, before passing it down. Dan was supposedly the office manager. The longest conversation Becky had ever had with him was the fifteen minutes he interviewed her, before needing to take a phone call. Dan had just screeched in from court, and he and Daniel embarked on a lengthy discussion about a case with which Becky had no familiarity. Valentina was able to ask one or two semi-informed questions, but really the male attorneys dominated the bulk of the conversation.

“The thing about these kinds of cases,” Tom was really working himself up now, pounding the table next to his glass of scotch, “is that they have absolutely nothing—no research, nothing—to prove that these people are any threat whatsoever! We really need to—”

Here Liz muttered something. Someone passed the cheese plate to her. Tom spoke louder, visibly irritated.

“We, as a society, should really do something—”

Liz muttered something else, interrupting again. Tom glared. Liz muttered into her plate.

“People just always have to find someone to blame, it’s amazing—”

This time, Becky, Valentina, and Laura all distinctly heard the words “hard cheese,” followed by a shaking of big hair. The clerks exchanged looks amongst each other.

“What—what,” exploded Tom, turning on Liz, “is your problem? Can you not see,” here he gestured the entire table, “that we’re talking? What, what is it? You want something else? What?!!”

Liz shrugged, and started to mutter.

“WHAT?!” said Tom. “We can’t HEAR YOU!”
“Well,” Liz shrugged her shoulders, holding up her hands, “Well, ya know, I was just looking for the hard cheese…”
“There!” said Tom, “right there! You have the cheese right in front of you!”
“Well, ya know… there isn’t any hard cheese… ya know, the hard cheese? That hard cheese that we usually get? I was just hopin’ for the hard cheese…” and then she devolved into muttering again.

Dan looked up from his phone. “I didn’t see any hard cheese either.” Mouth open, he and everyone inspected the table.

Tom’s eyes bulged out of his head. “Well,” he pronounced disdainfully, “did we,” now turning to Valentina, “not manage to get any hard cheese?”

Becky had that shrinking sensation again.

Valentina did her best to diplomatically state that no, ‘we’ had not gotten the particular cheese that Liz was thinking of, but that there was a very nice alternative, and that ‘we’ would certainly make an effort to get the cheese in question next time. People passed and helped themselves to more food, and there was a semi-awkward lull. Becky could have sworn she heard Liz iterate the words ‘hard’ and ‘cheese,’ in varying combinations, at least twenty more times during this space of a few minutes.

“Well,” Tom pronounced, “did anyone catch what happened on Dancing with the Stars last night?” Suddenly Tom was amazingly animated, and the table erupted in laughter and banter, and the conversation moved on.

Becky, who did not happen to own a television set, once again had little to nothing to contribute. For the rest of the evening, she sat silently in her corner, spitefully drinking wine and fretting about cheese, and thinking it was stupid to be fretting about cheese, but still fretting about cheese.

“But—but—you don’t understand. They were swim goggles. He was making her work on his swim goggles.” Becky was standing in their kitchen in her pajamas, having just put some water on for tea. She was appealing, as best she could, to her boyfriend’s sense of moral justice in this world.

He was drawing a blank.

“What? Swim goggles?”
“He was making her upload audio books onto his personal swim goggles!” she heard herself reaching hysterical. She crossed her arms over her chest, and watched a wisp of steam curl out of the mouth of the humming kettle.

He tried to process this. “But—I mean, he’s paying her, right? So who… cares?”

“But you don’t understand—he’s just so—pedantic—and—belittling—and—but—but—swim— Stephen!”
“It’s okay, Miss B.” Stephen folded her into a hug. He reached over and snapped off the stove, just as the kettle started to scream. “You’re right, you’re right.”
“You just—you couldn’t understand,” Becky sighed. “They’re so—so—”
“Swim goggles?” Stephen offered, handing her a box of chamomile.
Swim goggles!” Becky sighed. She poured herself a cup, and together they headed off to bed.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Lesson 1: Taking it out on your boyfriend

She came home that day feeling something miserable. It was not the first time. Lately the miserable days were far outnumbering the non-miserable days. Which is why she was so grateful that her boyfriend, whom she had moved in with just a few short months ago, had promised to go jogging with her that evening. It would be an understatement to say that she had been looking forward to this all day. It was the one last thread that had maintained her sanity throughout the last eight hours, that had kept her from running screaming from the insane requests, buzzes, phone calls, emails, and meetings that plagued her working life. Running, she had repeated to herself. Running tonight. Running tonight.

She took a deep breath, and, not feeling any less tense, swung open the back door of the apartment, stepping into the kitchen.

The kitchen opened out on the living room, where Stephen was sitting cross-legged on the couch. He was surrounded by notebooks and papers, and was intently focused on the laptop positioned directly in front of him.

“Hello,” he smiled, glancing up.
“Are we going running?” She something-less-than-snapped while rifling through the mail.
“Err… um…” he glanced at the screen in front of him. “Yes. Give me just one moment.” Hunched shoulders and rapid typing ensued.

She sighed. He kept typing. She tried sighing a little louder. Still typing. She stared as hard as she could, hoping to bore through the laptop, certain that if she could just regain eye contact he would immediately understand the utter urgency and desperation of the moment.

Stephen kept typing.

Exasperated, she gave up and stepped into the bedroom. Dropping keys then handbag then shoes, she face planted on the bed, and in the wink of an eye dropped into an angry sleep.

Forty minutes later she woke up feeling angrier. The daylight was waning. She stuck her head round the corner of the bedroom; half hoping the pillow hair might enhance the effect.

“HEY!” This was not yelling—she was not a yeller.
“Yes?” he looked up.
“You promised you’d take me jogging!” this was not whining—just a factual statement of the enormous treachery that had been committed.
“But… you fell asleep?”

The flood broke loose.

“AH! You’re horrible I hate you you’re the worst you you—” she continued, striding into the bedroom, pulling off her shirt and finding her things and tying her sneakers and now and then he would try to interject, in the mildest of tones, “But, Miss B—” which was invariably cut short by a dark look and heated if unintelligible muttering. She desperately wanted to beat him out of the house but unfortunately she had her long hair to tie back and bangs to pin up, so if anything he was ready before her, a fact that she attempted to ignore while slamming the screen door.

They strolled out into the waning light, shoulder to shoulder, an ominous silence growing between them.

Steve wore silver shoes and bright blue running shorts. He had an amiable English face, and endearingly scrawny legs. Steve hated to exercise. Constitutionally thin, he didn’t much see the point. It was something he did for her, because he knew that she loved it and loved his company.

They had walked nearly a block before he finally turned to her and appealed, “Miss B, how are you?”

To some, this might have been the tipping point: the ideal moment; to vent, to fold, to confess, to apologize, in short, to make some constructive effort towards feeling better. Our heroine declined this opportunity.

It swelled. She exploded.

“AH! I hate you!!” she not-yelled, and reaching up one arm she shoved Stephen directly sideways into the nearest hedge, before taking off full speed down the sidewalk, the fastest she could run.

Which, unfortunately for our heroine, was something less fast than the fastest Steve could run. After a brief episode of flailing about in the bushes, he reemerged on the sidewalk and easily caught up with her. At which point--being more of a jogger than a runner really, anyways—she ran short of breath, and was forced the indignity of having to slow down. What followed was a most peculiar form of exercise, as witnessed by the average onlooker. Sprint, then stop—sprint, then walk—sprint—walk—stop—wildly gesticulate—and then sprint again.

Between these spurts were short bursts of conversation: “But I—but you—but see—but AH!” “Miss B—please stop—I know—your job—” until finally, winding down, they walked side by side again, in the direction of home.

She felt something less than proud of herself. Breathing hard, hands on hips, she hung her head defensively, and as the last of it swelled in her chest, she exhaled, “but—see?”

“It’s okay, Miss B.”

They stopped with a scraping of sneakers on pavement. She considered, for the first time that evening, this possibility.

“It’s okay. Calm down, Miss B.”
“Don’t you tell me to calm down!” she finally smiled, and she let him slip his arm around her shoulders, and a few steps later slipped her arm around his waist as well.

“Stephen,” she said. A swallow lilted low on his way to his nest, and turning the corner she could see the glow of their porch light through the branches of the big willow tree.
“Hmm?”
“Do you love me even when I’m miserable and ridiculous?”
“Hm,” proffered Stephen, slipping his fingers into her right hand, and squeezing it in the dark.

She felt something more than lucky to have someone to cook a curry with that night.